The Financial Times Has a Doomed Web-Based Business Model, Like Every Paper Except the Wall Street Journal.
December 5, 2007
The newsprint world is dying. London's Financial Times is no different.
The editors do not know what to do. No one wants to pay. The "papers" (digits?) try one thing after another. Nothing works. Only the Wall Street Journal is making money.
The editors seek deliverance by turning everything over the the people in the IT department. IT people are devoid of marketing savvy. They care nothing about readers. They just want to make life easy for the IT department.
The New York Times finally gave up this year. The IT department had made it almost impossible for anyone to get through the registration barrier. I wrote about this in mid-2006. Nothing was done to change this. Management had no power over the IT department. Management never does. IT is always in control. The IT chief terrorizes mere managers with the digital bogeyman. The only way to regain control over IT was to remove IT from the loop, which management finally did.
No one was paying to read the paper's editorials. Its "premium content" marketing model was doomed. Insular New York City liberal blather as premium content? The model failed. The new model is equally doomed: free open access. But at least it's easier for readers. As long as you're on a sinking ship, you might as well go down smiling. (The Brits prefer a stiff upper lip, which makes smiling difficult. The result is the same.)
I experienced a taste of marketing suicide today. I clicked to an article on the FT site. I was told I had to register. Fine. I registered. I signed up for a free subscription, not a high-priced one. I don't need more than one article a week. I live in the United States. Why pay for a premium subscription?
I confirmed my subscription by email.
Then I returned to the article. This time, the computers recognized me. This time, unlike pre-registration, I was not allowed to sign in. There was no sign-in box. Instead, I was told that I had to subscribe. There was no other option.
But I had just subscribed.
The IT crew programmed the system to lead me to a page that gives me only one option: to subscribe. I cannot read anything on the site. Maybe forever.
Marketing idiocy? Yes, indeed. Idiocy all around, beginning with senior management.
Managers think registration will make them money. It won't.
Managers think the IT department knows what it's doing. It doesn't.
Readers who are at least willing to trust the "paper" enough to subscribe learn fast that neither management nor the IT department knows what it's doing.
Managers universally don't assign someone to test everything IT does -- every action-step page, every day -- on the assumption that IT will botch something crucial at any time, just as IT departments around the world do daily. Management assumes "We can trust IT." Doomed.
FT, like all other print newspapers except the Wall Street Journal, is a beached whale. It hasn't died yet, but it will.
Here is what I got on the page:
Interbank rates fuel concern
By David Oakley and Gillian Tett in LondonPublished: December 3 2007 23:56 | Last updated: December 3 2007 23:56
European and UK bank lending rates hit levels not seen for several years on Monday as banks sought funds to cover their commitments for the start of 2008 amid a tightening credit squeeze.
Sterling one-month interbank rates spiked more than 60 basis points to their highest since the end of 1998. European one-month rates rose to levels not seen since May 2001. US rates were also abnormally high.
You have viewed your allowance of 30 free articles. If you wish to read more, please subscribe.Enjoy UNLIMITED access to articles
Only subscribers have unlimited access to all the FT's content, comment and analysis -- including the 5 year archive.